Caltech News tagged with "humanities"http://www.caltech.edu/news/tag_ids/32/rss.xml
enHow the Brain Learns from the Past and Makes Good Decisions for the Future: A Tour of Neural Reinforcement Learninghttp://www.caltech.edu/news/how-brain-learns-past-and-makes-good-decisions-future-tour-neural-reinforcement-learning-45565
<div class="field field-name-field-subtitle field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Watson Lecture Preview</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Douglas Smith</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/ODoherty-WatsonLecture-NEWS-WEB.jpeg?itok=nYDDd7At" alt="fMRI scans of brain regions involved in value judgements" title="fMRI scans of brain regions involved in value judgements" /><div class="field field-name-field-caption field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Several areas of the brain are activated in the process of making value judgements, as these fMRI scans show.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-credit-sane-label field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Credit: John O&#039;Doherty/Caltech</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em>It is often said that people who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Not being one of those people requires a network of different brain regions to work in concert. On Wednesday, February 4 at 8 p.m. in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium, John P. O'Doherty, professor of psychology and director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, will discuss our current understanding of how we learn from experience. Admission is free.</em></p><p> </p><p><strong>Q: What do you do?</strong></p><p>A: I study how we learn from experience. Humans and other animals have to make decisions all the time to maximize their benefits and minimize danger. These decisions range from what I should have for dinner or should I cross the road—which could have life-changing consequences if I'm wrong—to the selection of a life partner. I don't claim that "Who should I marry?" is equivalent to "Carrots or Brussels sprouts?" but we do think that many decisions share certain commonalities. So we look at very simple tasks that give us a window into how the brain solves problems to maximize future rewards.</p><p>We study brain activity by putting your head in an fMRI scanner. "MRI" stands for magnetic resonance imaging, and you've probably had one if you've had a sports injury. The "f" stands for "functional," and an fMRI scan detects changes in the oxygenation levels in the blood. If a certain part of the brain is active, its oxygen supply increases. We map those increases onto the brain's anatomy in 3-D while our volunteers perform some task that involves learning.</p><p>A task might be playing virtual slot machines. You have a choice of three machines, and we tell you one machine pays better than the others. So you choose one, press the button, and get instant feedback—you win or you lose. As you try to work out which machine is better, we monitor the patterns of activity in various parts of your brain. One of our goals is to find the part of the brain that represents the <em>experienced</em> value of the things we meet in the world—how good it feels to win, or how bad to lose.</p><p>We're also interested in how the brain changes its expectations. As you play the machines, you're constantly revising your estimate of which machine is better. We have computational models that we think represent how the brain internalizes feedback, and we're trying to find brain areas where the activity matches those models.</p><p>We think that understanding the neural circuits and computations that underpin our decision-making capacity may shed some light on certain psychiatric disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and addiction. On some level, all of these can be seen as decision-making gone wrong. Addiction, for example, involves a choice—voluntary or otherwise—to engage in a certain pattern of behavior.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Q: Setting aside clinical disorders, why do people make garden-variety bad decisions? What leads us to cross a busy road and almost not make it?</strong></p><p>A: First, it's important to emphasize that humans are collectively pretty good at making decisions. That's why we've been so successful as a species. But there could be all sorts of reasons why an individual might make a poor decision. For example, you might underestimate how fast the traffic is moving.</p><p>My lab is particularly interested in how two distinct decision-making mechanisms may interact to produce bad outcomes. One mechanism is "goal-directed," in which you evaluate the consequences of your action in light of the goal you're pursuing. This requires a lot of mental energy. In contrast, "habit-controlled" decision-making is basically stimulus-response—you react to some cue from the environment. Habits can be very beneficial, because you can execute them quickly without thinking deeply. Once you learn to ride a bicycle, for example, you don't have to concentrate on keeping your balance. It becomes routine, and you can focus your mental energy on other things. Poor decisions can result when the habit system drives your behavior when you really should be solving things in a goal-directed manner. This may be how addiction becomes compulsive. The goal-directed system says, "I don't want to take this drug any more," but the habitual system overrides it.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Q: How did you get into this line of work?</strong></p><p>A: Even as a kid I was interested in science and its unsolved mysteries. I was actually keen on astronomy as a teenager and really considered going in that direction. Then I started getting interested in how computers work, which led me to start wondering about how the most complex computer that we know of works, namely our brain. So I basically had a career choice between studying the universe or studying the brain, which are probably the world's two greatest outstanding mysteries. I decided to take my chances on the brain.</p><p>At the time, the field of cognitive neuroscience was based on the paradigm that the brain is like a digital computer, and brain processes were modeled in essentially in the same way. There were lots of studies of memory, such as recalling lists of words, but very little was known about how the brain assigns a greater value to some things than others. But it's a really fundamental question, because the ability to work out whether something is good or bad—and to maximize behaviors that lead to good things and avoid bad things—is <em>critical</em> for survival. Digital computers typically don't make value judgments of that sort unless they are programmed to do so. So that's what excited me, trying to unlock how it is that the brain assigns value to things in the world.</p><p> </p><p><strong><em>Named for the late Caltech professor Earnest C. Watson, who founded the series in 1922, the Watson Lectures present Caltech and JPL researchers describing their work to the public. Many past Watson Lectures are available online at <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/watson-lectures-sd/id422627541">Caltech's iTunes U site</a>.</em></strong></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pr-links field-type-link-field field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Related Links:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://olab.caltech.edu/home.html" class="pr-link">The O'Doherty Lab's Website</a></div></div></div>Mon, 02 Feb 2015 19:21:38 +0000dsmith45565 at http://www.caltech.eduEinstein Online: An Interview with Diana Kormos-Buchwaldhttp://www.caltech.edu/news/einstein-online-interview-diana-kormos-buchwald-44998
<div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Kimm Fesenmaier</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/Einstein-Chalkboard-NEWS-WEB.jpg?itok=BqCnBFa1" alt="" /><div class="field field-name-field-caption field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The density of the Milky Way, Pasadena, January 1931.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-credit-sane-label field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Credit: Courtesy of the Albert Einstein Archives</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em>The Einstein Papers Project, housed at Caltech since 2000, has worked in collaboration with Princeton University Press, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the digital publishing platform Tizra to produce a digital edition of </em>The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein<em>. This new edition presents the world-renowned physicist's annotated writings and correspondence through 1923 on a free and publicly accessible </em><a href="http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu"><em>website</em></a><em>.</em></p><p><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Upon its launch today, </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">the digital papers</span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;"> will contain all 13 published volumes of </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Collected Papers</span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">, in Einstein's original German and translated into English, along with an index volume. Additional volumes will be added to the site about 18 months after each new volume is published. The 14th print volume, covering the period from April 1923 through May 1925 and including Einstein's trip to South America, is scheduled for publication in February 2015.</em></p><p><em>We recently sat down with Diana Kormos-Buchwald, professor of history at Caltech and director and general editor of the Einstein Papers Project, to talk about the project's new digital endeavor.</em></p><p> </p><p><strong><em>The digital edition</em> makes it so that anyone with access to the Internet can read Einstein's papers and correspondence from the first 44 years of his life for free. Why have you and your colleagues undertaken this massive project?</strong></p><p><em>The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein</em> is a unique project in and of itself. Einstein is the most revolutionary and famous scientist of the 20th century, and there is no similar integrated project that compiles and annotates a scientist's writings and correspondence. These scholarly volumes are addressed, in a way, to a specialist audience—the historian of science, the philosopher of science, the physicist who wants to read Einstein in his own words.</p><p>But Einstein is and always has been of great interest to the general public as well. His is the most recognized face on the Internet in all cultures. People are attracted to him because of his creativity, maybe because of his image as an unconventional scientist.</p><p>So we are now making available these volumes that have explanations and footnotes in English, introductions in English, bibliographies, plus full translations, along with the ability to see some of the original manuscripts in high-definition scans through links to the <a href="http://www.alberteinstein.info">Einstein Archives Online</a>, another project that we launched a few years ago in collaboration with the Hebrew University's Einstein Archives. We are presenting all of this in an integrated platform in which the user can search for words and phrases in both English and German.</p><p>Biographers and historians need to focus their attention and highlight a selection of documents. But we can present everything—his scientific papers, his letters to his children, his travel diaries, his impressions of foreign lands and cultures, etc.</p><p>I think it's a great achievement that we were able to put these volumes up without putting them behind a pay wall. The Press has done a wonderful job. Each volume is equivalent to something like 100 scientific papers, plus the translations. And we're making them free and open. This is a joint effort, and it furthers what I think of as an authoritative way of doing digital humanities.</p><p> </p><p><strong>What do you hope readers will take away from reading Einstein's papers?</strong></p><p>What I would hope the reader would find is how extraordinarily hard working Einstein was. Things didn't happen with flashes of insight. In the famous year 1905, when he publishes his papers on the special theory of relativity, quantum theory, Brownian motion, and E = mc<sup>2</sup>, he also publishes 20 reviews of other people's work.</p><p>We're putting up 5,000 documents. Einstein is known for 5 or 10, maybe 15 major papers; the 5,000 documents provide a context for those well-known papers. He was an extremely productive scientist who wrote two to three pieces per month for the rest of his career, between 1905 and the late 1930s. We have 1,000 writings, many of them unpublished. So the beauty of these volumes is also that they include drafts and writings on a variety of topics that were never published during his lifetime.</p><p>Also, Einstein was interested in a lot of fields of science. He started with great interest in physical chemistry and mastered that literature. And he continued through his entire career to be interested in applied physics, theoretical physics, experimental physics, chemistry, biochemistry. He has exchanges with doctors about physiology. So while Einstein is not a Renaissance figure the way let's say Helmholtz was—he is a specialized physicist—nevertheless, he is very curious.</p><p>We also hope to demolish some outstanding myths: Einstein was not the isolated theoretician working by himself in an attic with pen and paper. He was a modern, professional scientist, who earned his living through his work as a scientist and as a professor. He was not wealthy. He was the exemplar of the transformation, if you want, in academia at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, when science expanded a lot in universities. And the correspondence shows he has this ever-growing circle of friends and colleagues in science and engineering, and young people whom he shepherds and advises.</p><p> </p><p><strong>How long have you been working on this digital project with Princeton University Press, Tizra, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem?</strong></p><p>We have been planning this for several years. We wanted to present an accurate rendering of our volumes, which are highly specialized. And we wanted to make these volumes searchable—not only the scholarly annotations but also the scans, facsimiles, and reproductions.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Einstein famously spent several winter terms here at Caltech in the early 1930s, but the published volumes of <em>The Collected Papers </em>only cover his life through 1923. Are there items referencing Caltech in those volumes that we can look for in the digital edition?</strong></p><p>Yes, Einstein visited Caltech in 1931, '32, and '33, but his correspondence with scientists at Caltech goes back much further. For example, in 1913, Einstein wrote a <a href="http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol5-doc/609">letter</a> to George Ellery Hale asking whether the deflection of sunlight in the sun's gravitational field could be observed in the daytime. Hale <a href="http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol5-doc/616">wrote back</a> saying no, we cannot see that.</p><p>He also had contacts with Robert A. Millikan quite early on. In 1922, Millikan officially <a href="http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol13-doc/410">informed</a> Einstein that the National Academy of Sciences had elected him as a foreign associate. They also discuss scientific work quite a bit, and Millikan and Einstein both serve on the Intellectual Committee for International Cooperation of the League of Nations.</p><p>Einstein was instrumental in recommending several prominent scientists for recruitment very early in the founding of the Institute. The volumes also show correspondence between Einstein, Millikan, and Richard Tolman, professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics, who was one of the earliest relativists.</p><p>Einstein knows, right at the beginning, in the early 1920s, that Caltech is going to be an exciting place.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Was Einstein unusual in the size of his correspondence?</strong></p><p>Yes, his correspondence is very large for a scientist. It amounts to about 30,000 items to and from Einstein. It's of the size of Napoleon's papers—orders of magnitude larger than any other modern scientist.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This amount of correspondence testifies to Einstein's centrality in the scientific life of Europe in the 1920s. He does become a nexus, at least in physics. And he is flooded by requests—everything from requests from indigent students up to requests from very famous people that he should endorse this or that appeal, contribute to this or that volume, or participate in this or that conference. He gets to be in great demand.</span></p><p>He also gets a lot of inquiries from the general public about general relativity.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Does he answer them?</strong></p><p>Yes, he tries to respond to every letter he gets. He was extremely disciplined. He spent quite a lot of time answering correspondence.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Have any of your team's discoveries been particularly exciting for you?</strong></p><p>I was excited when, a few years ago, we discovered some new letters from Croatia—from a Croatian physicist dating back to early in Einstein's career. These were letters dating to 1911 and '12, before Einstein finished general relativity. I'm always very pleased when we find material prior to 1915 or '16 because Einstein's path from special relativity to general relativity is one of the most exciting intellectual journeys. Whenever we uncover new material from that decade, it is quite significant, because we have so little material for the young Einstein compared to the older Einstein. Later, his correspondence grows exponentially.</p></div></div></div>Fri, 05 Dec 2014 17:55:10 +0000kfesenma44998 at http://www.caltech.eduFrederick B. Thompsonhttp://www.caltech.edu/news/frederick-b-thompson-43160
<div class="field field-name-field-subtitle field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1922–2014</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Douglas Smith</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/Thompson-Frederick-OBIT-NEWS-WEB.jpg.jpeg?itok=nBnYugFh" alt="Caltech Professor of Applied Science and Philosophy Frederick B. Thompson" title="In Memoriam — Frederick B. Thompson, 1922–2014" /><div class="field field-name-field-caption field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Professor of Applied Science and Philosophy Frederick B. Thompson in a 1972 photograph.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-credit-sane-label field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Credit: Don Ivers/Caltech</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p> </p><p>Frederick Burtis Thompson, professor of applied philosophy and computer science, emeritus, passed away on May 27, 2014. The research that Thompson began in the 1960s helped pave the way for today's "expert systems" such as IBM's supercomputer <em>Jeopardy!</em> champ Watson and the interactive databases used in the medical profession. His work provided quick and easy access to the information stored in such systems by teaching the computer to understand human language, rather than forcing the casual user to learn a programming language.</p><p>Indeed, Caltech's <em>Engineering &amp; Science</em> magazine reported in 1981 that "Thompson predicts that within a decade a typical professional [by which he meant plumbers as well as doctors] will carry a pocket computer capable of communication in natural language."</p><p>"Natural language," otherwise known as everyday English, is rife with ambiguity. As Thompson noted in that same article, "Surgical reports, for instance, usually end with the statement that 'the patient left the operating room in good condition.' While doctors would understand that the phrase refers to the person's condition, some of us might imagine the poor patient wielding a broom to clean up."</p><p>Thompson cut through these ambiguities by paring "natural" English down to "formal" sublanguages that applied only to finite bodies of knowledge. While a typical native-born English speaker knows the meanings of 20,000 to 50,000 words, Thompson realized that very few of these words are actually <em>used</em> in any given situation. Instead, we constantly shift between sublanguages—sometimes from minute to minute—as we interact with other people.</p><p>Thompson's computer-compatible sublanguages had vocabularies of a few thousand words—some of which might be associated with pictures, audio files, or even video clips—and a simple grammar with a few dozen rules. In the plumber's case, this language might contain the names and functions of pipe fittings, vendors' catalogs, maps of the city's water and sewer systems, sets of architectural drawings, and the building code. So, for example, a plumber at a job site could type "I need a ¾ to ½ brass elbow at 315 South Hill Avenue," and, after some back-and-forth to clarify the details (such as threaded versus soldered, or a 90-degree elbow versus a 45), the computer would place the order and give the plumber directions to the store.</p><p>Born on July 26, 1922, Thompson served in the Army and worked at Douglas Aircraft during World War II before earning bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at UCLA in 1946 and 1947, respectively. He then moved to UC Berkeley to work with logician Alfred Tarski, whose mathematical definitions of "truth" in formal languages would set the course of Thompson's later career.</p><p>On getting his PhD in 1951, Thompson joined the RAND (Research ANd Development) Corporation, a "think tank" created within Douglas Aircraft during the war and subsequently spun off as an independent organization. It was the dawn of the computer age—UNIVAC, the first commercial general-purpose electronic data-processing system, went on sale that same year. Unlike previous machines built to perform specific calculations, UNIVAC ran programs written by its users. Initially, these programs were limited to simple statistical analyses; for example, the first UNIVAC was bought by the U.S. Census Bureau. Thompson pioneered a process called "discrete event simulation" that modeled complex phenomena by breaking them down into sequences of simple actions that happened in specified order, both within each sequence and in relation to actions in other, parallel sequences.</p><p>Thompson also helped model a thermonuclear attack on America's major cities in order to help devise an emergency services plan. According to Philip Neches (BS '73, MS '77, PhD '83), a Caltech trustee and one of Thompson's students, "When the team developed their answer, Fred was in tears: the destruction would be so devastating that no services would survive, even if a few people did. . . . This kind of hard-headed analysis eventually led policy makers to a simple conclusion: the only way to win a nuclear war is to never have one." Refined versions of these models were used in 2010 to optimize the deployment of medical teams in the wake of the magnitude-7.0 Haiti earthquake, according to Neches. "The models treated the doctors and supplies as the bombs, and calculated the number of people affected," he explains. "Life has its ironies, and Fred would be the first to appreciate them."</p><p>In 1957, Thompson joined General Electric Corporation's computer department. By 1960 he was working at GE's TEMPO (TEchnical Military Planning Operation) in Santa Barbara, where his natural-language research began. "Fred's first effort to teach English to a computer was a system called DEACON [for Direct English Access and CONtrol], developed in the early 1960s," says Neches.</p><p>Thompson arrived at Caltech in 1965 with a joint professorship in engineering and the humanities. "He advised the computer club as a canny way to recruit a small but dedicated cadre of students to work with him," Neches recalls. In 1969, Thompson began a lifelong collaboration with Bozena Dostert, a senior research fellow in linguistics who died in 2002. The collaboration was personal as well as professional; their wedding was the second marriage for each.</p><p>Although Thompson's and Dostert's work was grounded in linguistic theory, they moved beyond the traditional classification of words into parts of speech to incorporate an operational approach similar to computer languages such as FORTRAN. And thus they created REL, for Rapidly Extensible Language. REL's data structure was based on "objects" that not only described an item or action but allowed the user to specify the interval for which the description applied. For example:</p><p> Object: Mary Ann Summers</p><p> Attribute: driver's license</p><p> Value: yes</p><p> Start time: 1964</p><p> End time: current</p><p>"This foreshadowed today's semantic web representations," according to Peter Szolovits (BS '70, PhD '75), another of Thompson's students.</p><p>In a uniquely experimental approach, the Thompsons tested REL on complex optimization problems such as figuring out how to load a fleet of freighters—making sure the combined volumes of the assorted cargoes didn't exceed the capacities of the holds, distributing the weights evenly fore and aft, planning the most efficient itineraries, and so forth. Volunteers worked through various strategies by typing questions and commands into the computer. The records of these human-computer interactions were compared to transcripts of control sessions in which pairs of students attacked the same problem over a stack of paperwork face-to-face or by communicating with each other from separate locations via teletype machines. Statistical analysis of hundreds of hours' worth of seemingly unstructured dialogues teased out hidden patterns. These patterns included a five-to-one ratio between complete sentences—which had a remarkably invariant average length of seven words—and three-word sentence fragments. Similar patterns are heard today in the clipped cadences of the countdown to a rocket launch.</p><p>The "extensible" in REL referred to the ease with which new knowledge bases—vocabulary lists and the relationships between their entries—could be added. In the 1980s, the Thompsons extended REL to POL, for Problem Oriented Language, which had the ability to work out the meanings of words not in its vocabulary as well as coping with such human frailties as poor spelling, bad grammar, and errant punctuation—all on a high-end desktop computer at a time when other natural-language processors ran on room-sized mainframe machines.</p><p>"Fred taught both the most theoretical and the most practical computer science courses at the Institute long before Caltech had a formal computer science department. In his theory class, students proved the equivalence of a computable function to a recursive language to a Turing machine. In his data analysis class, students got their first appreciation of the growing power of the computer to handle volumes of data in novel and interesting ways," Neches says. "Fred and his students pioneered the arena of 'Big Data' more than 50 years ahead of the pack." Thompson co-founded Caltech's official computer science program along with professors Carver Mead (BS '56, MS '57, PhD '60) and Ivan Sutherland (MS '60) in 1976.</p><p>Adds Remy Sanouillet (MS '82, PhD '94), Thompson's last graduate student, "In terms of vision, Fred 'invented' the Internet well before Al Gore did. He saw, really <em>saw</em>, that we would be asking computers questions that could only be answered by fetching pieces of information stored on servers all over the world, putting the pieces together, and presenting the result in a universally comprehensible format that we now call HTML."</p><p>Thompson was a member of the scientific honorary society Sigma Xi, the Association for Symbolic Logic, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He wrote or coauthored more than 40 unclassified papers—and an unknown number of classified ones.</p><p>Thompson is survived by his first wife, Margaret Schnell Thompson, and his third wife, Carmen Edmond-Thompson; two children by his first marriage, Mary Ann Thompson Arildsen and Scott Thompson; and four grandchildren.</p><p>Plans for a celebration of Thompson's life are pending.</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pr-links field-type-link-field field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Related Links:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechES:45.1.Progress" class="pr-link">"Talking Back" (Research in Progress), E&amp;S September, 1981</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechES:36.1.thompson" class="pr-link">"The Dynamics of Information" by Frederick B. Thompson, E&amp;S October, 1972 </a></div></div></div>Tue, 01 Jul 2014 17:54:03 +0000dsmith43160 at http://www.caltech.eduSorting Out Emotionshttp://www.caltech.edu/news/sorting-out-emotions-43154
<div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Katie Neith</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/Adolphs-BrainIMG-NEWS-wEB.jpg?itok=Z2wEkBJu" alt="" /><div class="field field-name-credit-sane-label field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Credit: Ralph Adolphs / Caltech</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Evaluating another person's emotions based on facial expressions can sometimes be a complex task. As it turns out, this process isn't so easy for the brain to sort out either. Building on <a href="http://www.caltech.edu/content/focusing-faces">previous studies</a> targeting the amygdala, a region in the brain known to be important for the processing of emotional reactions, a team of researchers from Caltech, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, have found that some brain cells recognize emotions based on the viewer's preconceptions rather than the true emotion being expressed. In other words, it's possible for the brain to be biased. The team was able to record these responses from single neurons using existing electrodes—indicated by the arrows in the MRI image at right—placed in the brains of patients who were being treated for epilepsy. Participants were shown images of partially obscured faces showing either happiness or fear (see secondary image) and were asked to guess the emotion being shown. According to the researchers, the brain responded similarly whether or not the patient guessed the correct emotion.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">"These are very exciting findings suggesting that the amygdala doesn't just respond to what we see out there in the world, but rather to what we imagine or believe about the world," says Ralph Adolphs, the Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Caltech and coauthor of a paper that discusses the team's study. "It's particularly interesting because the amygdala has been linked to so many psychiatric diseases, ranging from anxiety to depression to autism. All of those diseases are about experiences happening in the minds of the patients, rather than objective facts about the world that everyone shares."</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">What's next? Says Shuo Wang, a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and first author of the paper, "Of course, the amygdala doesn't accomplish anything by itself. What we need to know next is what happens elsewhere in the brain, so we need to record not only from the amygdala, but also from other brain regions with which the amygdala is connected."</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The <a href="http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20140630-180911850">paper</a>, which also included Caltech postdoctoral scholar Oana Tudusciuc, was published on June 30 in the Early Edition of the </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Proceedings of the National Academy of Science</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">.</span></p></div></div></div>Mon, 30 Jun 2014 17:32:52 +0000katien43154 at http://www.caltech.eduAn Archimedes Revival in Pasadenahttp://www.caltech.edu/news/archimedes-revival-pasadena-42493
<div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Cynthia Eller</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/Archimedes-NEWS-WEB.jpg?itok=sqLVbU7j" alt="" /><div class="field field-name-field-caption field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Archimedes, <em>Opera, quae quidem extant, omnia</em> (All works which are in fact extant), Basel, 1544. Illustrated is the Greek text of the <em>Quadrature of the Parabola</em>, Proposition 16, showing that the area of the parabola is one-third the area of the triangle formed by the base, the tangent, and the line joining the base and tangent, and Proposition 17, that the area of the parabola is four-thirds the triangle with the same base and equal height.</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>It is a banner spring in Pasadena for the classical Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse. Exhibits at Caltech and the Huntington Library highlight the work of Archimedes, as it has made its way into the modern era. Lectures and conferences will complement the exhibits, helping viewers understand the historical and scientific significance of ancient Greek mathematics to later eras.</p><p>"Archimedes and the Recovery of Greek Mathematics," the exhibit at Caltech, begins April 7, 2014, and runs through the end of July. It is located on the second floor of the Parsons-Gates Hall of Administration.</p><p>The collection on display at Caltech comes from the collection of rare books in the <a href="http://archives.caltech.edu/">Caltech Archives</a> and is curated by Shelley Erwin, head of archives and special collections. The exhibit consists mainly of European editions, dating from the 16th through 18th centuries, of the work of Archimedes and other ancient Greek mathematicians. The first printed edition of the complete known works of Archimedes, released in 1544 in parallel Greek and Latin texts, will be on display, as will the first English translation of Euclid's <em>Elements</em>, published in 1570.</p><p>Noel Swerdlow, visiting associate in history at Caltech, will lecture on "The Recovery and Application of Greek Mathematics in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period" at the Beckman Institute auditorium on April 10, 2014, at 4:00 p.m. Swerdlow will select texts from the Caltech exhibit to illustrate how the work of Archimedes and others influenced early modern scientists such as Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler. He will review exhibit texts such as the 16th-century Italian editions of Euclid and Archimedes that Galileo read during his student years, and the 1621 edition of Diophantus's <em>Arithmetica,</em> famous because in his copy of the text, now lost, French mathematician Pierre de Fermat wrote a note that he had "a marvelous proof" that could not be contained in the margin. Known as Fermat's last conjecture, this theorem was supposed to demonstrate that although Diophantus had shown that a square could be divided into two squares, Fermat could prove that a cube, or fourth power, or any power higher than a square cannot be divided into two powers of the same kind. "The consensus," says Swerdlow, "which must be correct, is that there was something wrong with Fermat's proof"—the one he did not write down. Fermat's last conjecture was not in fact proved until 1994 by British mathematician Andrew Wiles, who needed over 100 pages to achieve this feat.</p><p>Swerdlow's special interest is in the history of mathematical astronomy, a field that blossomed in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries as early modern scientists drew on ancient Greek mathematics to pioneer Copernicus's heliocentric view of the universe. In his lecture, Swerdlow will describe the beginning of the recovery of Greek mathematics, found in an "Oration on the Dignity and Utility of the Mathematical Sciences," delivered by Johannes Regiomontanus in Padua in 1464. Swerdlow will discuss how proofs developed by Euclid were used by Galileo to explain why objects do not fly off the earth as it rotates and by Newton to explain centripetal force, and will show how Kepler used propositions by Archimedes and Apollonius to demonstrate that the orbits of planets are ellipses.</p><p>The inspiration for the Archimedes exhibit and Swerdlow's lecture at Caltech is the display of the famous <a href="http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/">Archimedes palimpsest</a> at the <a href="http://huntington.org/WebAssets/Templates/exhibitiondetail.aspx?id=14354">Huntington</a> from March 15 to June 22, 2014. This, the oldest surviving copy of Archimedes's work, contains one treatise not found elsewhere and one previously known only in Latin translation. The text was copied by an anonymous scribe in 10th-century Constantinople. Three hundred years later, a monk washed the ink from the parchment, rotated the sheets 90 degrees, and inked a liturgical text over the faded remnants of Archimedes's text, a common procedure in an era when writing materials were scarce.</p><p>The book was used for hundreds of years at the Monastery of Saint Sabas outside Jerusalem, and eventually found its way to the Metochion in Constantinople. There, in the mid 19th century, Archimedes's text, barely visible under the words of the prayer book, was first detected. Fifty years later, Johann Heiberg, a Danish classicist and editor of Greek mathematical texts, examining the text through a magnifying glass, recovered and published the treatises.</p><p>During World War I, the palimpsest went missing from its home in Constantinople. It surfaced briefly in the 1930s when a bookseller in Paris attempted unsuccessfully to sell it to various museums and libraries, including the Huntington. For the next 60 years, the palimpsest was treated poorly, for when it surfaced again in the 1990s and was auctioned off by Christie's, it was covered in mold, singed by fire, and had been inexpertly rebound with glue.</p><p>The palimpsest was purchased in 1998 by an anonymous American collector who immediately sought help for the text's restoration from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, near where he lived. It took four years to disbind the book and then several more years of imaging processes to reveal the ghostly ink of Archimedes's treatises under the liturgical text. Scientists with the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory used accelerator technology to make visible the text beneath four forged religious paintings that were apparently added in the 20th century in the hopes of increasing the book's market value.</p><p>The previously unknown texts discovered in the palimpsest are the <em>Method</em>, in which Archimedes shows how several of his principal discoveries were first investigated before being rigorously proved, and the Greek text of <em>On Floating Bodies</em>, which prior to the discovery of the Archimedes palimpsest was known completely only in a Latin translation from the 13th century. In addition, the Archimedes palimpsest includes a partial description of a puzzle called the <em>Stomachion</em>, also known from Latin and Arabic sources. In the puzzle, a square is cut into 14 pieces that can be reassembled in many different ways (according to a modern solution, the total number of ways is 17,152).</p><p>The Huntington is offering a curated tour of the Archimedes exhibit on April 17 at 4:30 p.m., and a lecture on the Archimedes palimpsest and its restoration on May 22 at 7:30 p.m., followed by a one-day symposium on Archimedes on May 23.</p></div></div></div>Mon, 07 Apr 2014 21:57:07 +0000celler42493 at http://www.caltech.eduLance E. Davishttp://www.caltech.edu/news/lance-e-davis-41855
<div class="field field-name-field-subtitle field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1928–2014</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Douglas Smith</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/Lance_Davis-OBT-NEWS-WEB.jpg?itok=Ck3XN3YA" alt="" /><div class="field field-name-field-caption field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Lance E. Davis, Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Social Science, Emeritus</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-credit-sane-label field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Credit: Caltech Archives</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Lance Edwin Davis, Caltech's Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Social Science, Emeritus, passed away on Monday, January 20, 2014, at age 85. Davis was a pioneer of "cliometrics"—from Clio, the Greek muse of history—which applies modern economic theories and mathematical techniques to economic systems that no longer exist, such as the New England textile industry. These analyses required him to sift through the data buried in such things as whalers' logs from New Bedford, Massachusetts, or the records of the East India Company in order to test his hypotheses about how defunct industries and empires actually worked. "In the process," says Philip Hoffman, the Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics and professor of history, "economic history became part of economics and the whole field was remade." Davis was also instrumental in establishing Caltech's social science doctoral program, a combination of economics and political science with a uniquely mathematical approach.</p><p>Davis was born on November 3, 1928, in Seattle. He graduated from high school in Willard, Washington, and enlisted in the Navy. In 1948 he enrolled in the University of Washington on the GI Bill, getting a BA in 1950 "just in time to get called back" for the Korean War, as he recalled in his oral history. He was discharged in 1952 and earned his PhD in economics from Johns Hopkins University in 1956.</p><p>As a graduate student, Davis became interested in how institutions evolve—a focus he would retain his entire career. His first book, <em>The Savings Bank of Baltimore, 1818–1866: A Historical and Analytical Study</em>, was cowritten with Peter Payne during Davis's first year at Johns Hopkins. As Davis recalled in his oral history, the bank "had an archive that nobody had ever looked at before" that contained the minutes of the bank's board of directors and its investing committee and a set of ledgers of all the transactions made by the patrons of the third savings bank to be established in the United States. In these documents Davis and Payne discovered a history of "continuous adaptation to environmental changes," in the words of the introductory essay. "The Bank evolved slowly from . . . when it was open only one day a week and had neither premises of its own nor a permanent administrative body, to an important financial institution having its own bank building and staffed by its own professional officers and employees."</p><p>After joining the faculty at Purdue University, Davis embarked on a broader analysis of 19th-century American financial markets. Here he "first made his mark," Hoffman says, by finding that in any given year, the local interest rates got higher the farther west one went from the financial centers on the eastern seaboard—part of "a broader pattern of obstacles he saw that kept investment from flowing into recently settled regions and new industries, and thereby slowed economic growth."</p><p>This led in turn to a study of the financial markets from which the American system had sprung. Davis spent entire summers in London examining the records of the merchant banks that, at the height of the British Empire, were the venture capitalists to the world. These banks invested heavily in American railroads, he learned, but, as he explained in his oral history, "they really [didn't] trust Americans very much, for good reason. So [they] all originally established a branch . . . in the United States" to oversee their investments, taking on a local bank as a junior partner. These Anglo-American banks came to be supplanted by a second generation of exclusively American-held banks, which "kind of nibble around the edge of railway finance" before ultimately easing their way into financing commerce and industry. "So in some sense the British decision not to trust the Americans sets off a train of institutional innovation that results in our current set of investment banks."</p><p>Davis continued studying British economic imperialism after joining Caltech as a full professor in 1968. Along with history professor Robert Huttenback, says Hoffman, Davis "asked a question that had agitated historians, economists, and even revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin: did Britain profit from having an empire?" In what became "one of the first-ever historical research projects that involved collecting huge amounts of data," Davis and Huttenback essentially audited the entire empire—not just the government's incomes and expenditures, but those of private firms as well. The empire proved to be a bad investment, with a net outflow of cash to the colonies, Davis said in his oral history. "As an economic attempt to exploit someplace . . . it was a dead loser." Why, then, did the average Briton staunchly support it? Perhaps it should really be viewed as a consumer good on a grand scale, Davis suggested. "[They] may have gotten satisfaction from running India . . . we buy ice cream because we like ice cream, and maybe they bought the empire because they liked empires."</p><p>Davis's interest in evolving institutions also led to a seminal collaboration with future Nobel laureate Douglass North. While Davis was still at Purdue, the two began devising a model to evaluate how people adapt and new institutions emerge when the cost of doing business as usual exceeds the benefits. Davis and North's book, <em>Institutional Change and American Economic Growth</em>, "was the first step in the broader claim that institutions are the key to understanding why countries are rich or poor—an insight that eventually won North a Nobel Prize," Hoffmann says.</p><p>Davis's most enduring legacy is Caltech's doctoral program in the social sciences. When he arrived, Caltech's Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences focused on fulfilling the undergraduate breadth requirement. But Davis had bigger plans. While on sabbatical from Purdue in 1964, he had been a Guggenheim Fellow at Nuffield College, the University of Oxford's home of the social sciences. There he had first seen that political scientists, economists, and even anthropologists had something to offer one another, he remarked in his oral history, and he came to Pasadena determined to build a program that "combined economics and political science in a way that nobody else had thought about doing." He recruited economist Charles Plott, a former colleague at Purdue, in 1971; two years later, Plott was performing economics and social-science experiments in collaboration with political scientist Morris Fiorina, whom Davis had recruited in 1972.</p><p>Fiorina and the other political scientists Davis enticed to Caltech had a then-unusual taste for economics. "The hilarious thing was that they couldn't get jobs in political science," Davis remarked in his oral history, because the political scientists who dominated the field at the time "did not really consider what they were doing as very interesting, useful stuff."</p><p>"Lance was very actively involved in recruiting and hiring. That's what he did. But he wasn't a dictator; there were other people involved, too," says David Grether, the Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Economics, Emeritus, and chair of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 1982 to 1992. "Caltech was an odd place to go, because there wasn't a program there. But because there wasn't, it was a <em>very</em> good place to go. You weren't displacing anybody." And, if the program did fail, Grether noted, "the worst that could happen was that you'd wind up teaching a small number of really good students."</p><p>The program was launched in 1973, and its emphasis on statistical methods attracted engineers and mathematicians that other graduate economics departments weren't courting. "We hit a market that had been ignored completely and that gradually has become very important," Davis said.</p><p>Davis became the Harkness Professor of Social Science in 1980 and served as executive officer for the social sciences from 1982 to 1985. He retired in 2005. He chaired the Council on Research in Economic History from 1973 to 1974, and served as president of the Economic History Association from 1978 to 1979. He wrote or coauthored some 100 papers and 10 books, and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991. He is survived by his ex-wife, Susan Davis, retired division administrator for the humanities and social sciences; a daughter from a previous marriage, Maili Bledsoe of Fort Smith, Arkansas; and four grandchildren.</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pr-links field-type-link-field field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Related Links:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://archives.caltech.edu/" class="pr-link">For more on Lance Davis, visit the Caltech Archives.</a></div></div></div>Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:58:54 +0000rbasu41855 at http://www.caltech.eduExploration: The Globe and Beyondhttp://www.caltech.edu/news/exploration-globe-and-beyond-41801
<div class="field field-name-field-subtitle field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A New Lecture Series at Caltech</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Cynthia Eller</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/mappamundi_1000.jpg?itok=YM_BLBZ_" alt="" /><div class="field field-name-field-caption field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Mappa mundi (a European medieval map of the world) created by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507. The map is titled "Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes (The Universal Cosmography according to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci and others)."</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-credit-sane-label field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Credit: Library of Congress Map Collection, Washington D.C.</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Caltech has long had a reputation for wide-ranging exploration, and now its Division of Humanities and Social Sciences is celebrating this theme in a lecture series titled Exploration: The Globe and Beyond. The series is intended to bring together a diverse community to discuss the broad theme of exploration, from antiquity to the present day, from new lands on Earth to other planets in our solar system.</p><p>"Exploration," says Professor of History Nicolas Wey-Gomez, "is an indeterminate process. It is about abandoning oneself to a search that may or may not lead somewhere other than where one began. However uncertain it may be at times, it is the prerequisite for any real discovery."</p><p>The first lecture in the series—"Junípero Serra and the Spanish 'Craze'"—was given on January 6 by historian Richard L. Kagan of Johns Hopkins University. Kagan described how Serra came to stand in as the "founding father of California, the Columbus of the West." The wave that Serra rode to this new status—well after his death—was part of what Kagan described as a "craze" for all things Spanish that arose, ironically, in the midst of the Spanish-American War in 1898. It was not only Californians who flirted with the tropes of brave conquistadors and pious bringers of civilization to indigenous peoples. Spanish culture flourished in popular songs, stage shows, architecture, and numerous public exhibitions across a young nation that was flexing its own muscles as a new world power.</p><p>Chet Van Duzer of the Library of Congress will be the next lecturer in the series, with a talk titled "Watching a Renaissance Cartographer at Work: The Construction of Waldseemüller's Carta Marina of 1516" on March 24. In 1516, mapping was accomplished by marshaling data from texts and travelers' reports and converting it into two-dimensional representations of lands and seas; today satellites make this task much easier.</p><p>Future lecturers in the <a href="http://www.caltech.edu/content/exploration-globe-and-beyond-seminar-series-0">series</a> will include Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology John Grotzinger, who will speak about the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, and Professor Deborah Coen of Barnard College, who will talk about her recent book <em>The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter</em>. All lectures are open to the public.</p></div></div></div>Thu, 16 Jan 2014 19:44:08 +0000celler41801 at http://www.caltech.eduEinstein: On the Beach and at Caltechhttp://www.caltech.edu/news/einstein-beach-and-caltech-41017
<div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Cynthia Eller</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/Einstein-Exhibit-0318-NEWS-WEB.jpg?itok=Xj2_7dSh" alt="" /><div class="field field-name-field-caption field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Los Angeles Opera patrons viewing the exhibit on Einstein at Caltech</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-credit-sane-label field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Credit: Jed Z. Buchwald</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The weekend of October 11–13 brought a revival of the 1976 opera <em>Einstein on the Beach</em> to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, and along with it an opportunity for the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech to display some of its treasures: prized portraits of Einstein, plus texts and images from Einstein's life.</p><p>The principal mission of the <a href="http://www.einstein.caltech.edu/">Einstein Papers Project</a> is to collect, edit, annotate, and translate all of Einstein's papers—a rich trove of material that includes not only published scientific works, but also his notebooks, lectures, diaries, and correspondence. Einstein bequeathed his papers to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which holds the largest collection of original Einstein manuscripts.</p><p>At Caltech, Professor of History Diana Kormos-Buchwald, director and general editor of the Einstein Papers Project, heads an international team of scholars who carry out research for <em>The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein,</em> published by Princeton University Press. The series is anticipated to fill 30 volumes and is nearing its halfway point. "It takes us two to three years for each documentary volume and its companion English-language translation, so it won't be us who finish the project," she says.</p><p>The latest volume (Volume 13), released on September 25, 2012, takes Einstein through a turbulent 15 months of his life from January 1922 to March 1923, during which he received the Nobel Prize and undertook a lengthy journey to Japan, Palestine, and Spain. Volume 14, slated for release in October 2014, covers the years from 1923 to 1925, documenting Einstein's reactions to the earliest formulations of quantum mechanics. "One of the very interesting things that we discover in every volume is how many projects Einstein was involved in that never led to concrete publications," Kormos-Buchwald says.</p><p>Because the Einstein Papers Project is the premier U.S. source for all things Einstein, when the Los Angeles Opera decided to bring <em>Einstein on the Beach</em> to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, it asked Kormos-Buchwald if she could arrange exhibits about the historical Einstein to display in the second- and third-floor lobbies. Caltech trustee Marc Stern, chair of the Los Angeles Opera board of directors, expressed his excitement about the project, and soon Kormos-Buchwald was working with Garrett Collins and the marketing and outreach departments at the Los Angeles Opera to devise an appropriate evocation of Einstein's connections both to California via Caltech and to music.</p><p>On opposite sides of the second floor lobby, two exhibits were set up by Kormos-Buchwald and a team of professional installers led by Sam Mellon of Curatorial Assistance in Pasadena. One contained the series of images <em>Albert Einstein at Home</em>, created by photographer Herman Landshoff between 1946 and 1950. The series consists of 12 portraits of Einstein in his later years, a humble man with wild hair wearing suspenders, working in his office or simply sitting or standing. There are six prints of this series in existence; one is owned by Caltech. The other exhibit consisted of nine collages, usually on permanent display at the Einstein Papers Project, that document Einstein's three winters at Caltech (1930–1933); also included were three wall-size color facsimiles, one of Einstein's high school diploma and two of his early hand-written manuscripts on relativity, that were created in collaboration with the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design from originals held at the Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.</p><p>The third-floor exhibit, designed by Kormos-Buchwald specifically for <em>Einstein on the Beach</em>, and printed by James Staub of Caltech Graphic Resources, featured photographs of Einstein playing violin or piano and meeting with musicians. It included quotes by Einstein about music and his favorite composers, and displayed manuscripts documenting Einstein's support of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra and his relationship with German composer Paul Dessau, who wrote a chamber music piece for violin and harpsichord (or piano) for Einstein's 50th birthday, in March 1929, as well as his own opera about the famed physicist, titled simply <em>Einstein</em> and performed in East Berlin in 1974.</p><p>Despite the sea of documentation of Einstein's life compiled by the Einstein Papers Project, Einstein remains an enigmatic figure, simultaneously a scientist and a celebrity. The collages created to illustrate Einstein's time at Caltech give a sense of the sideshow atmosphere surrounding Einstein's presence in Southern California: newspapers at the time reported random sightings of the great man, and Einstein recorded his impressions of the media attention in his diaries.</p><p>Einstein's mixed legacy is still on abundant display at Caltech. Einstein the scientist remains relevant in physics classrooms, both undergraduate and graduate, and his work resonates in the work of Caltech's researchers and theoreticians. But Einstein the celebrity is present too: his face is printed on posters and T-shirts at the Caltech Bookstore, the guest room at the Athenaeum where he stayed during his visits to Caltech still bears his name; and the Landshoff portraits exhibited for the performance of <em>Einstein on the Beach</em> grace the entryway of the Board of Trustees meeting room in Millikan Library.</p><p>It was this mix of science and celebrity surrounding Einstein that appealed to cutting-edge composer Philip Glass and experimental theater director Robert Wilson when they decided in the mid 1970s to collaborate on an opera based on a historical figure. As Glass reflects in his book, <em>Music by Philip Glass,</em> "As a child, Einstein had been one of my heroes. Growing up just after World War II, as I had, it was impossible not to know who he was. The emphatic, if catastrophic, beginnings of the nuclear age had made atomic energy the most widely discussed issue of the day."</p><p>The result of the collaboration was a nearly five-hour opera without intermissions. The opus makes no effort to tell a story, much less recount a man's life, but is nevertheless filled to the brim with Einstein. As Kormos-Buchwald explains, "You have a lot of visual symbolism in <em>Einstein on the Beach</em>. There are the portraits of Einstein projected onto the stage, and for half the opera you have a musician dressed as Einstein in suspenders playing the violin. But there are also elevators, illustrating the principle of equivalence, and space-time diagrams and rockets. You have a child playing with a flashlight and a compass, as Einstein himself did, and there are rigid rods and clocks throughout the opera, critical to Einstein's theory of special relativity. Thus many visual and pedagogical tools that Einstein employed to make relativity understandable are being used in the opera."</p><p>As documented in volume 13 of <em>The Collected Papers,</em> Einstein often expressed his desire for "a normal life," feeling at odds with his celebrity. And yet, Kormos-Buchwald suspects, Einstein might not have been astounded by the exhibits and operas, or by a 30-volume opus. "I think he was very well aware he was a public figure. He knew that everything he said would be used and scrutinized in the future."</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pr-links field-type-link-field field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Related Links:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.caltech.edu/content/caltech-and-princeton-university-press-release-thirteenth-volume-einstein-papers" class="pr-link">Caltech and Princeton University Press Release Thirteenth Volume of Einstein Papers</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.caltech.edu/content/einsteins-archive-now-available-online" class="pr-link">Einstein's Archive Now Available Online</a></div></div></div>Fri, 08 Nov 2013 22:24:49 +0000celler41017 at http://www.caltech.eduMaterialities, Texts, and Images: A Collaboration Between Caltech and the Huntington Libraryhttp://www.caltech.edu/news/materialities-texts-and-images-collaboration-between-caltech-and-huntington-library-41012
<div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Cynthia Eller</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/Brewer-MTI-Project-B2-NEWS-WEB.jpg?itok=cTHznGIK" alt="" /><div class="field field-name-field-caption field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A "grangerized" or extra-illustrated book. From the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, some book owners chose to add additional illustrations to bound books in their collections, a practice that highlights the materiality of printed texts. (Irving Browne, Iconoclasm and Whitewash. New York, 1886. Illustrated by the author. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.)</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>At an institution like Caltech, materiality is inescapable. Science and technology deal with physical things (or, at the least, with terms that stand in for physical things). In the humanities, however, the role of materiality is less clear. As John Brewer, Caltech's Eli and Edye Broad Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, points out, working humanists have "no Mars Rover or sea urchin to manipulate," so their connection to the material is less obvious. Indeed, humanists often concern themselves with ideas, language, memory, and culture—all of which are mental constructs. "For a long time," says Brewer, "everybody in the humanities was interested in what everything symbolized, which was rather abstract and metaphysical and linguistic."</p><p>The pendulum has swung, however, and now humanists are reevaluating the role of materiality in their disciplines. The emphasis today is more on the "stuffness" of the humanities—the way in which all cultural artifacts, from books to blueprints to bus tickets, are relations between and manipulations of physical things. Paintings, after all, are made of oils and canvas and pigments; books are made of paper and ink, cardboard and cloth (and perhaps today, computer chips). How are they created? How are they used? How have they been preserved and why? Their tangible existence as objects is a critical part of the insight they can offer us about human beings and culture, about the present and the past. Even things of great interest in the humanities that cannot be classified as objects are inevitably material; spoken language, for example, involves air, tongues, teeth, and larynxes.</p><p>The humanities' interest in the material has given rise to a new collaboration between Caltech and the Huntington Library, a premier research institution in the humanities less than a mile from Caltech in San Marino, California. "Materialities, Texts, and Images" (MTI), a two-year pilot program funded jointly by Caltech and the Huntington, explores texts and images through the lens of the material.</p><p>Rather than following the usual model for research in the humanities—choose a discipline; choose a part of the world; choose a time period; choose a subject—MTI is a decidedly methodological project. It asks the most general question in its purview: how materiality, the embeddedness of culture within tangible things, can be most effectively studied and theorized. As Steve Hindle, W. M. Keck Director of Research at the Huntington, explains, the scope of MTI "is not restricted to any particular time period, so it's not medieval or early modern or modern; it's not confined to any particular discipline, so it's not designed specifically, much less exclusively for historians or literary scholars or art historians." Instead, MTI breaks down disciplinary boundaries, embracing the humanities in all their diversity, without asking anyone to water down their specific research interests.</p><p>Over-specialization can be a pitfall in the humanities, according to Brewer. The interesting work goes deep, searching out meaningful details and engaging in exhaustive research. But the <em>most</em> interesting work goes deep and then comes up broad, articulating the significance of very specific research topics for theories and methods in the humanities generally. MTI is designed to be a platform where humanists from disparate fields can create the kind of synergy that pushes the humanities as a whole forward.</p><p>Two visiting postdoctoral fellows who, according to Hindle, were selected because they were "as different as possible," have been brought on board this year to get the MTI program under way.</p><p>The first, Stefanie Sobelle, is a professor of English at Gettysburg College who studies the interrelationship of architecture and literature in late 19th- and 20th-century America. Sobelle's work, she says, investigates how both architecture and literature engage in a "conceptual process of imagining a world and then creating it, in the use of architectural language to talk about a text, and in the book as a three-dimensional space that you move through and inhabit, which often very intentionally manipulates your experience of that space."</p><p>Sobelle's MTI counterpart, science historian Alexander Wragge-Morley, most recently at the University of Oxford, works with texts produced by British medical doctors in the late 17th and early 18th centuries to examine how British medics dealt with "the interconnections between knowledge production and matters concerning sensation, emotions, and aesthetics," he says. In his work, Wragge-Morley has found that although the early 18th century was when "these key separations between science and the arts are supposed to have been coming into play, the archives show that the sciences and humanities are much more vested in each other than it's sometimes convenient to realize."</p><p>Under the provisions of the MTI program, Sobelle has an office at the Huntington this fall while Wragge-Morley has an office at Caltech. Midway through the year, they will swap, so that each has an opportunity to participate fully in the lives of the institutions that are sponsoring their work. In the spring and summer, each will organize a workshop with speakers from diverse fields who share their interest in pushing the boundaries between academic disciplines while focusing on the role of materiality.</p><p>Both Sobelle and Wragge-Morley are excited about the potential of developing more extensive intellectual ties between Caltech and the Huntington, involving Caltech faculty in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), as well as faculty and researchers in other fields at Caltech.</p><p>Wragge-Morley, for example, is eager to contact neuroscientists at Caltech who are pioneering "the science of beauty" (a scientific undertaking, he notes, that was announced by British painter William Hogarth in 1753). "I think there are very interesting connections that can be drawn between the types of work being done at Caltech—which we could rename 'Materiality Central,' after all—and contemporary work in the humanities." Meanwhile, Sobelle hopes to talk to Caltech scientists about the models they create, because a model, she says, is "a form of representation and also a thing in and of itself. What kind of models are engineers creating? What about biologists? What about chemists? What does a model mean differently in those different fields? Do they think of the model as an aesthetic object in itself, or not?"</p><p>MTI's broad vision promises to bring fresh life to the pursuit of the humanistic disciplines at Caltech, Brewer says. "One of the nice things about this project is that it's one of those capacious things into which you can stick almost anything. It's like Mary Poppins's handbag, actually." Many Caltech faculty in the humanities already pursue scholarship that explores the concept of materiality, and they will be active participants in the MTI program as it gathers momentum. For example, Jennifer Jahner, Assistant Professor of English, studies medieval manuscripts not only for their manifest content, but also for the manner in which they have been copied and bound by hand. Professor of History Nicolas Wey-Gómez specializes in the rise of imperialism and the global south during the Age of Exploration, research that has drawn him into extensive study of the physical maps created and used by explorers in the Atlantic region.</p><p>The MTI program also strengthens ties between two world-class institutions that grew up together in the San Gabriel Valley. Astronomer George Ellery Hale, one of the scientific "troika" (including physical chemist Arthur A. Noyes and physicist Robert A. Millikan) that built Caltech into a world-renowned science and engineering institute, also served on the board of trustees of the Huntington Library in the 1920s. Hale's dream was to use the resources of the Huntington to create a humanities division for Caltech, which at that time was restricted to the physical sciences. Instead, Caltech created its own humanities division in 1927, and Hale helped mold the Huntington into an independent institution available to scholars and the general public alike. Today, the Huntington hosts 1,700 scholars annually—170 are funded by the Huntington itself, making it the largest and most competitive fellowship program in the United States.</p><p>Caltech's HSS division and the Huntington have other existing collaborations. The Eleanor Searle Visiting Professorship in the History of Science and Technology brings leading scholars in the field to Caltech to teach for HSS and pursue their own research through the Huntington collections, while a joint postdoctoral instructor program draws junior scholars for research and teaching. For HSS division chair Jonathan Katz, the real excitement of MTI is that it will expand Caltech's relationship with the Huntington, "which has always enriched our humanities program and provided access to unparalleled archival sources for our scholars." The MTI program, Katz says, will "bring Caltech and the Huntington together as an intellectual hub for this kind of inquiry."</p></div></div></div>Fri, 01 Nov 2013 16:24:59 +0000celler41012 at http://www.caltech.eduCause and Effect: An Interview with Frederick Eberhardthttp://www.caltech.edu/news/cause-and-effect-interview-frederick-eberhardt-40429
<div class="field field-name-news-writer field-type-ds field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">News Writer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Cynthia Eller</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-images field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="ds-1col file file-image file-image-jpeg view-mode-full_grid_9 clearfix ">
<img src="http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/styles/article_photo/s3/FEberhardt_6987-NEWS-WEB.jpg?itok=fWXC40VM" alt="" /><div class="field field-name-credit-sane-label field-type-ds field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Credit: Lance Hayashida</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em>Determining cause and effect is complex and fraught with difficulty, from our intuitive—but often mistaken—sense of the causes of events in our daily lives to the perils of structuring and interpreting scientific experimentation. One problem with teasing apart these relationships is that there are many cause-and-effect sequences that we can </em>only<em> observe; we cannot meaningfully intervene, which may make it more problematic to test causal relations. For example, we did not come to know that the gravitation of the moon causes Earth's tides by removing the moon to observe how Earth's tides would be affected by its absence. Other means of establishing causality were required.</em></p><p><em>More bedeviling for anyone seeking to find an accurate causal sequence is how often we observe things that look like causal relations but are only correlations—that is, variables that change (or seem to change) in relationship to one another but are not causally related. If you catch four colds this winter, you may recall that you went outside with wet hair before coming down with each one. This is a correlation. What you don't know—and what might require further reflection and experimentation—is whether the wet hair actually </em>caused<em> the cold. </em></p><p><em>Untangling causal relations and correlations is what Professor of Philosophy Frederick Eberhardt has come to Caltech to do. We recently spoke with him about how causal relations can be identified—and why they matter. </em></p><p><strong>Why does causation matter?</strong></p><p>Causal issues are everywhere. They're in policy, they're in medicine, they're in our basic sciences.</p><p><strong>Can you give an example of a correlation that might not involve causation?</strong></p><p>Let's take the example of eating ice cream and drowning. These two variables are correlated: when rates of ice cream consumption rise, so do cases of drowning. So we might wonder whether this is a causal relationship: Does eating ice cream cause drowning?</p><p>There's a big debate in philosophy over exactly what constitutes a causal relation.</p><p>To say one is the cause of the other, we presumably don't require that every time someone eats ice cream they go and drown. So it's only a weaker, probabilistic relation. But it may be more than just a probabilistic relation since, in this example, we think that there could be a common cause: such as good weather, which increases the probability of both ice cream consumption and drowning. If this is the case, it is the common cause that gives rise to the observed correlation. However, if we intervened to increase the consumption of ice cream while holding everything else fixed, and rates of drowning increased as well, then there would be good reason to think that we had identified a causal relation. So, a rather useful way to think about causal relations is that they support certain kinds of interventions.</p><p><strong>Given how tricky it can be to establish causality in complex real-world systems, are there correlations for which you think a causal relationship is well established?</strong></p><p>That smoking causes lung cancer is reasonably well established. This was not always obvious. Not every smoker died of lung cancer, right? Whether or not drinking red wine in reasonable amounts is related to less cardiovascular disease is not so clear yet. Climate change, of course, is another example. You see the debates about the causal relations involved in climate change and the extent to which we can establish them on the basis of the finite data that we have. Maybe we don't need to know the causes of climate change in order to predict what will happen, but it's crucial to know the causal relations in order to know whether your intervention is going to be efficacious.</p><p><strong>Do you ever find it difficult to avoid confusing "causal" and "casual"?</strong></p><p>It does happen, because, of course, spell checkers don't catch this. But I guess your fingers have a motor memory of what sequence the letters come in. Because of what I do, it's more likely that I will make a typo in an invitation to a party saying, "Please, it's <em>causal</em> clothing.</p><p><strong>Are you planning to be the conscience of Caltech? Hovering over researchers' shoulders saying, "Not so fast!"</strong></p><p>I think that's the risk of someone working in methodology, that they become the preacher. I don't want to be the preacher but rather get my hands dirty in the data as well. I try to develop algorithms that infer from one or many different data sets, the causal relations among the variables. These algorithms could prove useful to scientists attempting to ferret out the causal relations in their statistical data.</p><p><strong>What attracted you to the position at Caltech?</strong></p><p>If you ask other philosophers whether my work is philosophy, they might cringe a little bit and think that I fall more into a technical environment. I actually think these methodological questions about understanding the difference between causality and correlations are fundamentally philosophical problems. I think here at Caltech, this categorization of research topics just won't be an issue. I think people will hopefully see that what I do is relevant and that it matters to a lot of fields, and then who cares whether you call it "philosophy" or not? A lot of people write "interdisciplinarity" on their flag, but very few people do it. I am looking forward to working with some very bright students at Caltech who hopefully will share my disregard for disciplinary boundaries.</p><p><strong>Will you be collaborating with other faculty at Caltech?</strong></p><p>I hope to find other faculty and researchers here who in their own work have become interested in questions about causality and are keen to pursue those questions in collaborations, but projects like these will need time to develop.</p><p><em>Eberhardt was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, because his parents—both biologists—were living on the Galápagos Islands. He grew up in Germany and received his B.Sc. in philosophy and mathematics from the London School of Economics before doing graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University, postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and at Carnegie Mellon University, and taking on an assistant professorship at Washington University in St. Louis. He is joined in California by his wife, Minoli Ratnatunga, an economist at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, and their young son, Gustav.</em></p></div></div></div>Tue, 01 Oct 2013 22:46:26 +0000celler40429 at http://www.caltech.edu